Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday October 15, 2009 @08:42AM
from the better-wear-a-hard-hat dept.

An anonymous reader writes "An electromagnetic 'black hole' that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time. The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity. A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards."

It's a lens, specifically, that bends light into a spiral path that ends in the middle of the lens. It could presumably be used to amplify light into a small point. The same small point, regardless of the way the light strikes the surface of the lens, making it potentially useful for solid-state light gathering.

The Chinese paper refers to effectiveness at 18GHz, which just so happens to be in the "K" band of radar frequencies. You know, the one police like to use.

So all these guys need to do is make a dashboard- or grille-mounted radar absorber to obsolete the radar detector and they'll be so rich they'll forget their ultimate goal of destroying the world or whatever.